Google Apps – Dark Themes Encouraged For Saving Battery Life

The requests for a dark theme within various apps were made by users for quite some time. The demand could only rise due to the inherent brightness of the Google Material Theme so, naturally, Google’s apps started to adopt night modes. Now, according to the company’s own research, this latest strategy had interesting results when the battery savings involved were quantified with darker interfaces.

SlashGear released a report according to which, during a session at the Android Dev Summint in 2018, Google took the stage to talk about how the colors in apps affect the battery life directly. There were no surprises when we found out that the increased brightness resulted in more power being used.

However, there was one more interesting finding discovered by Google over these last couple of years represents the specific energy draw of certain colors. The color blue and its many shades seem to take 25 percent more power than red or green in an RGB arrangement. Black is on one end of the spectrum, while white is at the other one.

Naturally, this comes as context of Google announcing in 2015 Material Design where white was widely used and, after all this research, the recent Material Theme is a redesigned feature coming with stark bright backgrounds. Google now knows what this means and notes the more and more implementing of the dark theme in apps over the past year.

In a statement, the company had this to say: “Guess which color we’ve been pushing you towards over the past couple years. Material came out three years ago and we change from Holo, which is nice dark theme, to this white theme instead. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot, slightly, in terms of power.”

Carrie Ryley was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale. As a journalist Carmen has contributed to NPR News Blog, Outdoor Magazine and many other publications. In regards to academics, Carrie earned a degree in business degree from A&N and earned her master’s degree at University of Florida. Carrie covers local news and culture stories here at Miami Morning Star.